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ISIS Threatens Life of Twitter Founder After Thousands of Account Suspensions

Patrick O'Neill writes After a wave of account bannings that marks Twitter's most aggressive move ever against ISIS, new images circulated from militants shows founder Jack Dorsey in crosshairs with the caption "Twitter, you started this war." The famously tech-savy ISIS has met a number of defeats on American-built social media recently with sites like Twitter and YouTube banning the group's efforts in unprecedented numbers.

18 of 533 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Last straw? by Black+Parrot · · Score: 5, Insightful

    if they aren't stopped now, you'll be fighting them in your streets someday

    Precisely the argument used to rationalize the war in Vietnam.

    --
    Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
  2. Re:Last straw? by caseih · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Funny how short your memory is. The last 10 years of fighting in foreign countries has worked out real well for us, hasn't it.

    I think we'd have a much better chance fighting ISIS on our own turf than invading yet another Arab country that we could never hold and win.

  3. Re:Last straw? by StevenMaurer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Probably not. His head is too far up Mohammed's ass to see the real world.

    According to the Wikipedia article on the subject, as of "15 January 2015, it was reported that over 16,000 airstrikes had been carried out by the Coalition". Please note that this coalition consists of both a backbone of U.S. military power, and surrounding Islam-majority states like Jordan, which the Obama administration has coaxed into the war.

    Let me repeat that, in case you appear to misread it. 16,000 airstrikes

    I'm not exactly sure how anyone can say we're not "stopping them". Indeed, about the only thing they can really do at this point is make snuff videos of idiots who wander into the region.

    But go back to watching your wall-to-wall CPAC coverage and FOX lies. That seems to be what you prefer. No actual facts seem likely to persuade you.

  4. Re:I don't think Obama is really paying attention by Camel+Pilot · · Score: 5, Insightful

    He says they just need a job, but a majority had jobs before becoming radicalized. They often have college too. So to come out and say it's not faith based, when clearly they tie everything to their perverted version of Islam, either means he thinks we are not paying attention, or he's not.

    Or he is smarter and more strategic than you are. By refusing to acknowledge ISIS as 'real' Islam he takes away ISIS primary claim to legitimacy and hands that legitimacy to the moderate Muslims (ie Jordan) that will join in the fight against ISIS.

  5. Re:Last straw? by ganjadude · · Score: 5, Insightful

    and the opposite argument was used to allow germany to take over poland. My guess is the right argument is somewhere in the middle

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  6. Re:Last straw? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The challenge is to defeat them without killing tons of people ...

    Before we try to defeat them, maybe we should think about what will replace them. The reason we have ISIS is because we defeated Saddam Hussein without thinking much about what would come next. The rationale at the time was that whatever replaced him couldn't possibly be worse. Well, that was wrong.

  7. Paying it forward. by Camel+Pilot · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The reason for the short term memory is that for the average voter the last two wars cost them personally _nothing_ and were if anything entertainment. Now if the president came out and said we are going to mobilize again to fight ISIS and a new 2015 tax of $200/person will be levied to pay for the war you would see a change of heart in minute.

  8. Re:Last straw? by Locke2005 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No, they can also continue kidnapping young women to hand out to their soldiers as sex slaves, which as near as I can tell is their primary recruiting tool. I appreciate the air strikes, but air strikes alone don't solve the problem. What is needed is a regional coalition to put boots on the ground. The country in the best position to put boots on the ground is Iran, which may be why we are currently attempting to cozy up to them -- we share a common enemy.

    --
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  9. Re:Jerri by Microlith · · Score: 5, Insightful

    this is on Obama's watch and he has been totally negligent.

    Because we are TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE!

    Its because hes a coward and would rather let the menace rage out of control than take it on.

    Indeed, instead of containing them we should just go in guns blazing, because that's always the best way to counter problematic ideologies. It always works out so well. It's also easy for the armchair general to send soldiers to die for whatever cause they deem worthy.

  10. Re:Jerri by ArchieBunker · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The problem with groups like ISIS (and Vietnam for that matter) is simple. We cannot play by the rules and expect to win against an enemy that has no rules. ISIS exists because we destabilized Iraq by getting rid of Saddam. Yes he was a murderous dictator but that is the only way to keep that place in order. There are plenty of people who committed worse crimes than Saddam and yet we did nothing.

    --
    Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
  11. Re:Bombs? by blue+trane · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What if he just dropped money, and the terrorists bought TVs and sat around getting high on all that good hash, watching cartoons, instead of terrorizing.

  12. Re:Jerri by circletimessquare · · Score: 5, Insightful

    because the bush administration did so well with the "jump in guns blazing" routine

    which, btw, led to the creation of ISIS

    much like the economic crisis of 2008, also miraculously blamed on obama, conservatives have this stunning routine where they fuck up, and liberals are at fault for it somehow with creative loopy psychological projection

    btw, the economy was fixed under obama, much like he is also trying to fix the mess created by neocon chickenhawks in the middle east, like an adult

    while all the hot headed children do their best to start a war, waste money and lives, and make things worse. you and those like you (hi, netanyu, you protocol disrespecting fuck, you've permanently damaged us-israeli relations for a little temporary macho chest thumping) think more war in the middle east will actually fix things. because you geniuses haven't learned from the last half dozen decades what messing around in the middle east actually leads to

    oh, and a small tip for you:

    "pinko" expired as an effective insult in the cold war era, which ended 25 years ago, which might be the last time you had a coherent thought on the topic you inject your ignorant belligerence into

    --
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  13. Re:I don't think Obama is really paying attention by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Do you really think that an organization of many thousands of people which slaughters other Muslims for being insufficiently Muslim will give a rat's ass whether or not a politician in the US considers them to be sufficiently Muslim?

    Probably not, but ISIS is not the audience. Everyone else is. Ponder it a bit more.

  14. Re:Last straw? by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The reason we have ISIS is because we defeated Saddam Hussein without thinking much about what would come next.

    Not true. There were people talking in front of the UN audience, warning exactly what would come next in 2003.

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  15. Re:Jerri by Jast_Sagami · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Spot on. Bush had a hard-on for Sadam and Rumsfeld wanted to take a selfie with Sadam to complete his picture collection. This whole ISIS mess is "W"'s and Cheney's fault. They both need to be in the Hague standing trial for crimes against humanity and for general stupidity.

  16. Re:Last straw? by Richard_at_work · · Score: 5, Insightful

    People always bring up Neville Chamberlain and his "peace in our time" speech - let me ask you this: what would you have done in his stead?

    Go to war? Kick Germany's butt? Yeah, lets put Nazi aggression in its place, teach them a lesson.

    Ok. Go to war with what? in 1938 we didn't have an effective army or airforce, our only real might was in the Royal Navy. Which works wonders for stopping land based aggression. Our airforce was still largely made up of older designs, especially the Hawker Hurricane which was a design based on a biplane... It would be a few years yet until we had an airforce of any real capability.

    So he tried a different approach - it was well recognised even back then that Germany had been royally screwed over by the agreements at the end of the first world war, so perhaps some appeasement was in order to try and placate that issue - was Germany just taking back what should never have been taken from it in the first place?

    Of course we went to war anyway, and under Chamberlains watch - and guess what happened on our first outing? We got our butts kicked and sand kicked in our face. We lost 40,000 troops to German prison camps and got thrown off the continent at Dunkirk.

    And that was after we had stepped up our war footing. Imagine what it would have been like if we didn't have have Neville Chamberlains two years to get to a point where we were able to just about ensure that Nazi Germany didn't take the British Isles as well as the continent...

  17. Re: Jerri by peragrin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Because it was bush that set the terms for the Iraq pull out of newly independent and soverigen country of Iraq.

    Obama wasn't stupid enough to force an issue where if he left troops in Iraq against the sovereign wishes of Iraq those troops would be subjected to Iraq and international war crime laws.

    Of course republicans don't care about such issues as sovereign countries having rights too.

    --
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  18. Re:Jerri by dywolf · · Score: 5, Insightful

    One thing is different this time though.

    ISIS is dumb.
    And because of that they are actually losing. No really. They are trying to use media and social media to prevent this image of them as this scary and violent group, but it's both backfiring, turning everyone against them, and a mask for for their losses.

    They're aren't fighting an asymmetrical battle. They have essentially discarded or ignored the basic playbook of the past few decades. They are attempting to engage us in traditional and conventional methods, rather than an insurgency, which is why we, and the Jordanians and Kurds, are beating them back soundly. ISIS hasn't made or kept any gains since late September, when they lost their initial momentum the had built up through surprise and the time it took us to organize a response.

    But then ISIS also isn't like the other militant groups in the past.

    This is a group of True Believers.

    They truly believe they are the inheritors of the caliphate, and that their victory is assured by God. And that belief has lead them to (so far) forgo an insurgency and instead fight conventional battles, conventional battles in the open in which they are getting stomped, because they are utterly assured of their eventual victory. And then there's the apocalyptic aspect of their beliefs. And that they are so violent and crazy that even Al Qaeda doesn't want anything to do with them; that they are alienating all their potential allies, turning friends into enemies (which is one BIG reason why we need to keep the RWNJ's from getting their way and turning this into a "war on islam" instead of a "war on extremists"...ISIS WANTS it to be a war on Islam).

    This group may eventually realize that they are going to fall apart and be destroyed unless they change their tactics.
    But again, as a group of True Believers who doesn't accept the potential to lose as a real possibility, that change may not happen.

    http://www.vox.com/2015/2/23/8...

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